Bringing humanism and constructivism from digital games to learning environments

Development of digital educational games in Kendir Studios is neither quick nor easy. Our main goal is, and always will be, to assure the educational quality of these tools.

It might sound boring, but that means we had to go through educational theories and make sure we were designing the game architectures based on educational principles to which we could adhere to.

Here’s how we did it!

HUMANISTIC THEORY AND HUMAN-FOCUSED DESIGN (HFD)

The humanistic theory in learning and teaching is the concept of centring the student in the learning experience, directly opposing the traditional model of knowledge transmission by a teacher. Instead, it neglects results and focuses on impactful, experiential, and process-based knowledge acquisition. Currently it’s considered the state-of-the-art educational theory by UNESCO. The main principles are:

• Student choice – choice is key, encouraging and giving autonomy to students to choose their degree of focus and dedication in each subject.
• Self-motivation – The more and more immersive the intrinsic motivation factors, the more inspired and effective are the students in the learning process.
• Self-assessment – The student should, in any way possible, get constructive feedback and opportunities to try again during assessment moments (if existing), with the pace being defined by the student.
• Safe learning environment – Students should feel physically, mentally, and emotionally safe to focus on learning.
• Interconnect emotion and knowledge – The student’s emotional connection to the acquired knowledge allows the enhancement of focus and knowledge retention.

For that reason, it’s considered best practice the development of any information system with human interaction to follow a humanized or human-focused design, which implies breaking down the design process into three distinct phases:

1. Inspiration - In education, that means we need to assure we are producing the right type of solutions and educational mechanisms for the target audience, understanding what challenges, struggles and desires students face in each school year. It is about not building what we think is important for students but what they actually want, putting ourselves in their shoes. That way, when we build educational solutions, we are making sure these are real-life connected, grounded in their realities and they will be empathic and, therefore, more engaged and motivated.
2. Ideation - Each game mechanism and learning moment must be worked under the learning outcomes from the first phase and continuous iterations should be attempted with students, gathering as much feedback as possible.
3. Implementation - We put this dynamic in practice by developing in five stages: prototype, mvp, alpha, beta and final versions. This means that, technically, our iteration with students will never end, as we will gather all positive and negative feedback for future versions of the game and other games to be developed.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

There are a lot of good characteristics that make digital games such an important tool in today’s education. But one that is particularly relevant is the ability to construct knowledge.

Constructivism, a theory that originated in epistemology, focus on learning through the construction of knowledge and bases it on the experiences of the learner.

This assumes that students take an active role in the learning process and that students will acquire knowledge through active engagement with the world, such as through experiments or real-world problem solving.

Learning is also seen as a social activity, something that is done through interactions, rather than abstract concepts.

Building the right type of digital games

Until now, teachers have been mostly unable to implement these theories in the classroom in an integrated and consistent manner due to time, budget, and curriculum constraints.

The truth is, all of the pictures of students grabbing materials and using tools and projects to learn, in many cases, seem like a distant dream.

And that is where our digital games come into play. We develop educational experiences based on both these theories and, making full use of the flexibility and range of digital architectures and features and we construct experiences that:

• Place students in real-life simulations or believable scenarios through safe digital environments.
• Create objects, instruments, tools, and scenarios with which they interact and work with, including sandbox scenarios.
• Introduce contextualized learning moments, giving students narrative context, humanized characters with humanized features, dialogue and feedback.
• Ramify options and choices for students to reach an educational goal, making them active agents in their stories.
• Create true progression to their learning journeys, so they can build on previous experiences.

This article is a part of the White Paper series of posts which will go into detail about each of the topics that compose it, including Liber Domus, the game that puts into practice everything we discuss here. The White Paper will be released in early September.

Keep in touch to learn more about our work during the next weeks, as well as Liber Domus and all the new features as we approach the start of 22/23 school year.

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